The New York Times alleges that these companies infringed on its copyright by using its articles to train their AI systems, such as ChatGPT and Bing Chat. The newspaper claims that the AI not only copied articles but also produced content usually protected by its paywall. The Times also accuses the AI of fabricating content and falsely attributing it to the newspaper when real content is unavailable. The case includes claims for direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement, unfair competition, trademark dilution, and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Key takeaways:
- The fair use doctrine in copyright law is being challenged by authors and copyright owners due to the use of copyrighted materials by generative AI programs.
- Several high-profile cases have been filed, including class actions by Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Authors Guild, and Sarah Silverman against OpenAI and Meta Platforms.
- The New York Times has filed a complaint against OpenAI, Microsoft and others, alleging copyright infringement, unfair competition, trademark dilution, and violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in relation to the training of its Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT) systems.
- The Times alleges that GPT copied published articles verbatim, stored encoded copies of the works in computer memory, and reproduced copies of the training dataset, resulting in millions of The Times works being copied for the purpose of training the GPT models.